Shells

• 1971 Thompson shell
• 1975 PWB (aka Mashey) shell
• 1978 C shell (C)
• 1979 Bourne shell (C, macros like ALGOL 68)
• 1980 COMMAND.COM (x86 assembly)
• 1981 TENEX C shell (C)
• 1983 Korn shell (C)
• 1988 Hamilton C shell (C)
• 1989 Almquist shell (C)
• 1989 rc Unix shell (Hare) 🐇
• 1989 Bourne Again shell aka Bash 📦 (C) Linux, macOS (old), Windows (WSL, Git for Windows) Bash vs Bourne
• 1990 Z shell (C) macOS (new) comparisons
  • Oh My Zsh (Shell) why
  • Starship (Rust)
  • Antigen (Shell, Perl)
  • Prezto
  • zplug
  • zen
  • Antidote (Shell)
• 1993 Command Prompt aka cmd.exe (C, C++) Windows (old)
• 1997 Debian Almquist Shell aka Dash (C)
• 2005 Fish (Rust) 🐟
• 2006 PowerShell (C#, PowerShell) Windows (new) Windows Terminal
• 2019 Nu shell (Rust) ✨
• 202? ? create first agentic shell too late 😆
• 2025 Flux159/agentic-shell 🔥
• 2025 mikecvet/nl-sh wrapper 🔥
• 202? ?

# M2 Pro

uname -v
Darwin Kernel Version 25.0.0: Thu Aug 14 22:03:32 PDT 2025; root:xnu-12377.1.8~5/RELEASE_ARM64_T6020

sw_vers
ProductName:		macOS
ProductVersion:		26.0
BuildVersion:		25A5349a

cat /etc/shells                   
# List of acceptable shells for chpass(1).
# Ftpd will not allow users to connect who are not using
# one of these shells.

/bin/bash
/bin/csh
/bin/dash
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/zsh